Emacs For Vim

26 Feb 2008

I’m having a whack at trying to learn a reasonable amount of Emacs so I can attempt a project more reasonably in sbcl (and Weblocks). I’ve been programming in Vim for about 12 years and my brain/hands are very, very angry at this editor transgression.

Mostly because I know I’ll give up, and then try again much later, here’s some stuff that is permanently ingrained in my Vim brain that is the closest I could find in Emacs (so far at least). To be edited as I find more things. Vim on the left, Emacs on the right:

Movement

C-f, C-b = C-v, M-v

hjkl = C-b, C-n, C-p, C-f

HL (or ^$ for most people) = C-a, C-e

wb = M-f, M-b

O, o = ? (C-o does some stupid thing)

u, C-r = ?

Change/Deleting

das = ?

cab = ?

gqap = ?

dd = ?

Clipboard

“+y = ?

“+P = ?

The page movement commands are probably my biggest problem right now: for one they’re the dumb ones like Vim’s C-u/C-d that only move half a page (haven’t figured out how to make them only leave one line instead yet), and for two, it’s just kind of painful because you have to move your pinky and then repress the v, rather than just hold down control and toggle between f/b. Anyway, whatever. I’ll suck and use PgUp/PgDn for now.

No hjkl of course kills me, but everyone else too.

I keep hitting Esc when I’m done entering text so then the next Ctrl/Meta command doesn’t work because it’s been prefixed by an Escape. Ack. Pffft.

The most amusing thing so far is that I couldn’t figure out enough to edit my .emacs in Emacs so the first few edits were: